Git's rise to become the de facto standard revision control system has been fascinating to watch.
I think it does provided real benefit over Subversion, but there are also smaller projects where the gain is marginal.
The tooling around (in particular GitHub) and perception that git is the "right" way to do things probably helped it achieve prominence. As well as early adoption by a few high profile projects.
That being said, most complaints about Git are of its difficulty for newcomers, non straightforward workflow, and lack of clear, concise documentation. Once the concept is reasonably grok'ed, one would likely be hard pressed to find a developer who prefers a centralized system such as SVN over Git.
Are we talking about the same Git? Its command line interface is quite straight forward and very simple to use to perform the usual everyday tasks.
Can you actually point out a single example of what you perceive as a "landfill fire"?
I mean, that's pretty much how all version control systems operate. Is it that hard to wrap anyone's head around the basic functionality that is common to any version control system in use?
I get that you like Git's UI, or at least don't mind it. That's fine. Others feel differently. That's fine too.
git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD"Subversion has no internal concept of a branch—it knows only how to make copies"
Now even if I do not need distributed features of git, I have VCS with local repo with git and I have easy branching. So even if I work on my side project I use branching a lot because I can do cheap experiment branches, go back to previous state or pick what I liked in my experiment. For me it is just totally different approach to development. When I stopped using Subversion and started using GIT my world changed for better, GIT gives me more control. I can pick parts of files to be staged or pick what I need to be commited. Where partial commits with subversion is at least black magic.
So even for smaller projects it is like a whole world of difference for using GIT.
Try randomly slapping your hands on a keyboard and writing software in <insert language>. Now complain that because you can't do that, <insert language> sucks. That's basically how I see these types of complaints about git.
These koans point out how the UX of Git often makes it harder (than necessary) to learn.
> try randomly slapping your hands on a keyboard [...] you can't do that
Well it worked when they chose all those command line arugment letters... </s>